Comparing 25 IT CVs in 1990 to 25 in 2014 – a ‘Dissected’ Infographic

( Post 24 of 25 )

For the penultimate post of our CR 25 campaign, we came up with the idea to compare 25 of our CVs from 1990 – when we first opened shop as an IT recruitment agency – to 25 from more recently (during the year 2014). Once we had the data in our hands, had taken a look at it, analysed it and compared it, we realised that it would be really good to display the comparisons visually, side-by-side. Infographics have become a really popular way of doing exactly that, but we also wanted to explain and give our thoughts on the data as we went along, which would have made the infographic very text-heavy (and very long). So we came up with an alternative approach…

Ladies and gentlemen, we present the first (to our knowledge) ‘dissected’ infographic! The full (text-light) infographic is shown at the bottom of this post, but before that, each section (a.k.a. data point) is displayed individually, with a bit of text under each section giving our observations on the differences that 25 years makes in the IT industry in the UK (and especially South Wales).

Just remember:

1990 is on the left

and

2014 is on the right

Here we go…

Gender

There has been a major discussion in recent years about the gender divide in the IT industry. Six months ago, the BBC reported that “women account for just 16% of the UK IT workforce.” Sadly, our data roughly backs this up… As expected, there has been an increase in the number of women that we have received CVs from (from 4% in 1990 to 12% in 2014, based on our samples of data), but it’s not a significant leap.

The BBC article goes on to suggest that the problem “starts early” – i.e. when children are in school. Hopefully, some of the cool things going on with ICT/Computer Science in primary and secondary schools at the moment (as highlighted in one of our posts from last week) will help to change the situation in the coming years, and that we’ll begin to see not only more people entering IT as a profession, but more women doing so as well.

Year of Birth (Earliest vs. Latest)

There’s not really much to take away from this, but we thought that it was interesting how there is a 46-year difference between 1990’s oldest candidate and 2014’s youngest. In fact, when we received a CV from a 43-year-old candidate in 1990, our youngest in 2014 still wouldn’t be born for another three years…

Country

The vast majority of CVs that we receive are from UK residents, and coincidentally all 50 CVs that we analysed seemed to fit that criteria. We thought that maybe we’d see more CVs from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and further afield in 2014, but in fact we saw the opposite: we received more CVs from candidates already residing in Wales than we did back in 1990.

County (Wales)

…And speaking of Wales, we dove into the geographical breakdown a little further and distinguished the difference between which Welsh counties* our CVs came from. There hasn’t been much change over the years, with the majority coming from the South Glamorgan area (which includes Cardiff).

* A quick note: In 1996, between our two sets of data, the Welsh counties changed from the preserved counties of Wales to the principal areas of Wales. To avoid confusing things too much, we chose to stick to the earlier of the two for both sets of data, which is why we show the (abolished) Glamorganshire counties, Gwent and Dyfed rather than their modern-day counterparts.

Skills (Overall)

Analyst Programmers (more modernly known as Developers/Coders these days), Project Managers and Tech Support staff appeared in both sets of CVs from both years. And while there were fewer A/Ps in our 2014 sample, there were more Project Managers and Tech Support staff.

You can’t really take away much more from the data. For example, just because we had a Designer and a Business Analyst in the 1990 sample but not in the 2014 sample, it’s not to say that we don’t get Designers or Business Analysts applying anymore, or companies requiring them. A wider sample might have given us more insight into this. Perhaps we can do a Part 2 in the future…

That said, when looking at just the A/Ps in particular, you can certainly pick up on a few interesting things…

Skills (Analyst Programmers only)

Looking solely at the Analyst Programmers a little deeper, we see a diverse range of skills across both sets of years, which vary majorly. RPG was very popular back in the day, while last year shows more of a mix.

Skills (Changes)

More interestingly, the only ‘survivor’ was Java, which appeared both years. RPG, Oracle and COBOL only appear in the 1990 sample, while the 2014 sample introduces Adobe, C#, PHP, SQL Server and VB (Visual Basic).

That’s not to say the 1990 skills that are ‘Gone’ are gone forever – for example, Oracle isn’t exactly obsolete (we had a guest post from an Oracle DBA just a few days ago). Similiarly, Microsoft’s first SQL Server release dates back to 1989, so SQL Server as a whole is not necessarily ‘new’ new.

Salary

This one may need a little bit of explaining: the left-hand semi-circles are the average salaries overall for each year, while the right-hand semi-circles are the average salaries of the Analyst Programmers only. The Highest and Lowest figures take into account the salaries overall, i.e. all 25 CVs from each year.

As expected, the overall salaries have increased over the years – in fact, they’ve nearly doubled!

The High vs. Low differences are interesting to look at as well… In 1990, the difference was around £20k. In 2014, it was nearly £40k. Again, an increase of almost double in 25 years – that’s a pretty wide gap in 2014.

Industry

Lastly, we took a look at the industries and how they have changed over the years. Obviously WWW and Mobile are new in 2014, with Health, IT (General) and Travel seeing a rise between the years. Defence, Financial, Manufacturing and Retail all saw a decrease compared to 1990. Manufacturing especially saw a drop, from 7 to 0…

The infographic in full

Here is the infographic in full (and ‘undissected’), with an embed code below it, in case you would like to upload it onto your own blog/site:

Here’s the embed code – remember to copy and paste the code in your website editor’s raw HTML version (e.g. the Text editor for WordPress sites):